This situation… well, it sucks, to be plain spoken about it. But have done the best I can, and I have a clear conscience about it. I wish we could have delivered those 4000+ Mark IIs… but we can’t.
When I joined Mycroft, two years after the Kickstarter campaign, one of my goals was to ensure that all the Kickstarter backers (such as myself) got their expected Mark IIs. Unfortunately, it has not worked out that way. I’ve personally invested $2.5M in that quixotic quest and, barring some sort of miracle, it’s not going to happen.
When I talk about “orders”, I mean specifically actual orders: purchases through the website starting in 2021. Kickstarter “rewards” and Indiegogo “perks” are not “orders”, as I’ve explained previously. [From the Kickstarter website: “Kickstarter is not a store, backers pledge to projects to help them come to life and support a creative process. To thank their backers for their support, project creators offer unique rewards that speak to the spirit of what they’re hoping to create.”].
We had to very consciously make that distinction in order to produce any Mark IIs, and thus have any chance of delivering those rewards and perks. But at this point it would cost over a million dollars just in components to deliver all of those, and Mycroft’s bank balance is several orders of magnitude lower than that.